Common Sense Media Review
Poorly executed batting practice simulator.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 8+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Play
Videos and Photos
The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice
What's It About?
THE CAGES: PRO STYLE BATTING PRACTICE is a small collection of batting mini-games that are intended to teach the gamer how to hit particular types of pitches. Starting out with a short training session, players can opt to compete in challenges such as hitting a specific type of pitch or enter a game of Panel Baseball. Panel Baseball removes all fielding and is simple a target approach to baseball where if you avoid the "Out" targets, you advance a base-runner. Hitting other targets can also advance runners to score runs. Additionally, the game tracks each player as they play the game, offering a caloric burn rate accompanied by a diagram of the equivalent food item for that calorie range.
Is It Any Good?
As a video game, The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice isn’t a very entertaining title. Most baseball games include a home run derby as a single mini-game, but this game's entire shtick is batting.While the game is supposed to teach some basic batting skills and instruct on how to identify pitch types, it’s execution is so different from reality that playing this game would likely confuse young athletes. During practice, the game does show a replay of your swing to help teach the basics, but without the Wii Motion Plus adapter this isn’t going to help much. And when you do attach the Wii Motion Plus add-on, the batting practice becomes so difficult that kids will be frustrated rather than eager to learn.
The Panel Baseball and Multiplayer modes allow for more than one player to share a single Wii Remote, and keep more players involved. The in game music and visual presentation are very bland, and definitely not close to what the Wii is capable of.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Does this activity provide you with a good amount of exercise, or would time be better spent outside?
Families can talk about the prevalence of advertising at sporting events.
Are video games able to take the place of real world practice? Or would it be better to head to a real batting cage and hit balls?
Game Details
- Platform : Nintendo Wii
- Pricing structure :
- Available online? : Not available online
- Publisher : Konami
- Release date : July 6, 2010
- Genre : Sports
- ESRB rating :
- Last updated : August 30, 2016
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